I don’t have anything mathematical to say about this, but I imagined a human version. X asks Y for advice on some matter. Y has a motive for giving advice that X finds effective (it will improve his standing with X), but also has ulterior motives, that might or might not be to X’s benefit. His advice will be selected to be effective for both solving X’s problem and advancing Y’s personal agenda, but perhaps less effective for the former than if the latter had not been a consideration.
Imagine a student asking a professor for career advice, and the professor suggesting the student do a Ph.D. with him. Will the student discover he’s just paperclipping for the professor, and would have been better off accepting his friend’s offer of co-founding a startup? But that friend has an agenda also.
For a more extreme fictional example of this, I’m reminded of K.J. Parker’s Scavenger trilogy, which begins with a man waking up on a battlefield, left for dead. He has taken a head injury and lost his memory. On his travels through the world, trying to discover who he was, everyone he meets, however helpful they seem, uses him for their own ends. Apparently he was known as the wickedest man in the world, but everything he does to get away from his past life just brings him back into it, spreading death and destruction wherever he goes.
I don’t have anything mathematical to say about this, but I imagined a human version. X asks Y for advice on some matter. Y has a motive for giving advice that X finds effective (it will improve his standing with X), but also has ulterior motives, that might or might not be to X’s benefit. His advice will be selected to be effective for both solving X’s problem and advancing Y’s personal agenda, but perhaps less effective for the former than if the latter had not been a consideration.
Imagine a student asking a professor for career advice, and the professor suggesting the student do a Ph.D. with him. Will the student discover he’s just paperclipping for the professor, and would have been better off accepting his friend’s offer of co-founding a startup? But that friend has an agenda also.
For a more extreme fictional example of this, I’m reminded of K.J. Parker’s Scavenger trilogy, which begins with a man waking up on a battlefield, left for dead. He has taken a head injury and lost his memory. On his travels through the world, trying to discover who he was, everyone he meets, however helpful they seem, uses him for their own ends. Apparently he was known as the wickedest man in the world, but everything he does to get away from his past life just brings him back into it, spreading death and destruction wherever he goes.